You've all played the Jumping Game. Maybe you've only played it once and didn't care for it. Maybe you only ever play it for short spaces of time. Maybe, like me, you have identified its signature across many different games.

More commonly found in first person or third person games that allow some degree of freedom in movement and feature irregularly formed terrain, the Jumping Game is played by trying to jump up something that may or may not be a wall.

A little while ago we took a gander at a couple of board games that we’d been playing recently, and both were pretty obscure titles. This week we’ve got a look at another two games, both of which are from IPs that you should recognize. Let the games begin.

Modern game production dictates that everything released must have multiplayer functionality, regardless of development budgets and how appropriate a multiplayer feature might be to a particular title. Although this trend is a headache for many a developer, it can also be a heartache for those who end up becoming particularly attached to a game's multiplayer option as sadly, these features have no guaranteed permanence.

Anyone who's built a PC themselves or owned one for long enough has undoubtedly had moments that made them question their hobby. Random crashes, complete failure, even smoke and flames are usually part of the course as far as being a PC enthusiast goes (thankfully random crashes are rare these days, complete failure even more so and it's been years since we've smelt the sickly-sweet smell of burned silicon.)

Slouching awkwardly against one of the hand rails on the train during my daily commute the other week I found myself captivated by a gentleman sat in my line-of-sight playing something on his iPad. Until his gaze flicked up causing me to nonchalantly drift my eyes away and pretend I was just glaring at everything in the carriage like a normal person and not just him, I had been transfixed by whatever it was that he was playing because of one simple fact: I had no idea what it was.

Anyone who has played Monkey Island, and even a fair few who haven’t, will immediately know the correct response is “How appropriate, you fight like a cow”. Insult swordfighting is one of the most famous examples of a gameplay mechanic which has utterly fallen out of fashion in recent years: memory challenges.

While online multiplayer is great, sometimes there isn’t a substitute to simply having a few friends round, opening a case of beers and playing some board games. Here’s a look at a pair of games we’ve been playing recently, and our thoughts on whether they're worth a punt or not.

When Adam Jensen's first act as a freshly augmented trans-human super-spy was to nonchalantly squat-walk into the storage area of a building site and knock over a pile of construction supplies, alerting the nearby patrolling guards to his location, I realised I'd been here before.

As he hopped around with one foot lodged in a bucket proclaiming "I never asked for this" at the bemused mercenary who had come to investigate, the pattern unravelled itself before my eyes. In every game that gives me the chance, I always end up playing the stealthy option. Badly.

Sony is a company with good ideas. Perplexing, sometimes poorly thought out, oft messy ideas, but good ones all the same. The PSP has always been held up as one of the company's better ideas hobbled by a little bit of poor execution, and the unfortunate fact that it was going up against a handheld gaming best-in-class heavyweight that had been clocking up experience in the market since the 80s.

I have a love-hate relationship with NAS boxes. Part of me adores them. They offer a form redundancy for your data, can perform many functions such as FTP, photo and media servers, Bit-Torrent clients and many more, without the need for a PC. And they’re also smaller than a shoebox. The mere fact they’re designed to carry out a set number of tasks – far fewer than a Windows PC – means they’re very streamlined and usually easy and simple to use.